NexoNet: Blockchain Online Social Media with User-Centric Multiple Incentive Mechanism and PoAP Consensus Mechanism

Online social media (OSM) has revolutionized the manner in which communication unfolds, enabling users to spontaneously generate, disseminate, share, and aggregate multimedia data across the internet. Nevertheless, in this exchange of information, OSM platforms assume a dominant, central role, wielding excessive power. Blockchain online social media (BOSM) seeks to mitigate the drawbacks of traditional centralized OSM by leveraging the decentralized nature of blockchain technology, migrating the functionalities of social media into a decentralized realm, and positioning the users at the core of the OSM ecosystem. However, current BOSM models often rely on tokens for incentives and are hampered by the centralized, inefficient blockchain consensus mechanisms, alongside vulnerabilities such as collusion attacks. This paper introduces a novel blockchain system, NexoNet, tailored for decentralized social media, exploring the application of blockchain technology in the realm of online social media from both technical and economic perspectives. The NexoNet quantifies and evaluates user participation within the system, employing a multiple incentive mechanism to equitably distribute value created by users without the need for tokens. Furthermore, we propose the Proof-of-Active-Participation (PoAP) blockchain consensus mechanism, enabling all users to partake in the maintenance of the blockchain system, thus ensuring its security and efficiency. Theoretical analysis and simulations across various scenarios demonstrate that the NexoNet, with extensive user engagement, achieves equitable value distribution through its multiple incentive mechanism. It successfully safeguards against a spectrum of malicious attacks and attains high transaction processing efficiency. The simulation results show that NexoNet achieves an average transaction throughput of 2000 transactions per second (TPS) and a consensus delay of 2.385 s with 100 maintainers in the network. Furthermore, our tests demonstrated that even collusion with users comprising 75% of the total would only allow an additional 30 chances to propose a block. By deeply integrating user behavior with the underlying mechanisms of the blockchain system, the NexoNet fosters a user-centric blockchain social media ecosystem.